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2008 LISTING CHALLENGE The Audubon Society of Kalamazoo (ASK) is sponsoring a 2008 Bird Listing Challenge, a competition in  which participants keep records of the species of birds they see or hear in one county in a year. This competition is intended to be a fun way for participants to get out and see birds as well as connect with each other. Participants may submit lists for any of the following counties: Allegan, Barry, Berrien, Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Kalamazoo, St. Joseph, or Van Buren.  The competition begins January 1, 2008. Final lists are to be turned into ASK by January 15, 2009. One winner will be announced for each county. Results will be published in the ASK newsletter. ASK has a variety of resources (such as books and field trips) for beginning birdwatchers interested in joining in this competition. Rules: 1. The bird must have been located in 2008 and within the county boundaries of Allegan, Barry, Berrien,     Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Kalamazoo, St. Joseph, or Van Buren. 2. Participants may turn in lists for more than one county. 3. Participants may compete as a team (1-5 people). The team does not need to see all birds together; members can pool their lists. 4. The bird must be alive, wild, and unrestrained. 5. The bird must have been encountered under conditions that conform to the American Birding Association Code of Birding Ethics (see their website http://www.americanbirding.org/bigday/ethics.pdf).  6. Be fair; do all you can do to be correct in your identifications of the birds. 7. "Professional" birders (or those who are paid to look for birds) are discouraged from participating. 8. Participants must live in one of the participating counties.  To receive a checklist for the county or counties in which you'd like to compete, please contact Russ Schipper, (269) 375-7210.    RESULTS OF THE 2007 LISTING CHALLENGE In the ASK Listing Challenge, participants were to record all the species they could find in a county in Southwest Michigan. This was to be completed within the calendar year 2007. There were 8 participants and 15 lists submitted. Lists were returned for Allegan, Barry, Berrien, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, and Van Buren Counties. No lists were sent in for Branch, Cass, or St. Joseph Counties. The total species seen in the combined lists of all counties was 253. In all counties, 34 species were reported by all participants, while 32 species were reported by only one participant. The county with the most species reported was Berrien at 235. The overall highest species count in all counties by one observer was 240, by Jan Shillito. Now for the county winners with the highest species list first: Berrien - Jan Shillito (233), Van Buren - Mary Wyatt (196), Kalamazoo - Jan Shillito (184), Barry - Joyce Leppard (136), Allegan - Ilse Gebhard (86), Calhoun - tie John & Marilyn Doty (75). Because usually everyone does not see the same species, here are the cumulative lists for each county: Berrien (235), Kalamazoo (202), Van Buren (198), Barry (142), Allegan, (100), Calhoun (75).  A side benefit of something like this is that one learns where and when to find certain species and how difficult, or easy, some species are to find in a specific county. Several people commented that they learned a lot about the habitats of the county they live in, including a few places they didn't even know existed. When there are 253 species involved it is very likely that several unusual to just plain rare species will be found. There were, and they are listed below; the county(s) the species was found in is given in parentheses. There were several other interesting species reported that I didn't include in the unusual column, but that does not mean they were not a very nice find. Also, what may not be unusual in one county may have never been recorded in another. In the Listing Challenge I think that species would be the Red-throated Loon seen on the Kalamazoo River by Marilyn and John Doty. This is probably one of the very few records of this species in Calhoun County. They are almost always seen on the Great Lakes. In the end, seeing birds means getting out of doors; these folks got out (in all seasons) and saw birds. Thank you all for participating. Rare Species: Black Rail (Berrien) Black-necked Stilt (Berrien) Unusual Species: Ross's Goose (Van Buren) Red-necked Grebe (Kalamazoo) American White Pelican (Kalamazoo) Buff-breasted Sandpiper (Van Buren) Little Gull (Berrien) Iceland Gull (Berrien)  Lesser Black-backed Gull (Berrien, Kalamazoo) Chuck-wills-widow (Berrien) Rufous Hummingbird (Kalamazoo, Van Buren) Worm-eating Warbler (Berrien) Le Conte's Sparrow (Berrien) Red Crossbill (Berrien) White-winged Crossbill (Berrien)   BANNER COMMON REDPOLL YEAR AT THE PITSFIELD BANDING STATION By Rich Keith  Have you seen Common Redpolls at your feeders this year? Just a few times over the last 30 years I've had them here at our property near Vicksburg. This year has been crazy. On December 14, 2007, I banded six. As of February 8, 2008, I have banded 1,025. I know of a few places nearby with banded redpolls at their feeders and would like to know if anyone else is seeing banded birds. If you do, please let me know at 327-0671. After the redpolls go back north, I will give a more complete report on what's happened here.   KAL-HAVEN TRAIL ANNUAL PASSES Kal-Haven Trail annual passes are now available for purchase. They are great for holiday gifts, and early purchase means being able to use them starting New Year's Day. Individual passes are $15, and family passes are $35. Visit the website for an order form and where to send it:  www.vbco.org/government0129.asp.   SHOP SMART, SAVE BIRDS Natural Resources Defense Council: A Shopper's Guide to Home Tissue Products Canada's boreal forest is one of the largest unspoiled forests left on earth. It provides breeding grounds for up to three billion birds each spring, and nearly half of all the bird species in North America depend on the boreal for survival. Boreal bird habitat is being destroyed to make toilet paper, facial tissues, paper towels, and other disposable paper products. You can help halt this destruction by making smart shopping decisions. This green guide provides a list of tissue paper products to buy - and a few to avoid. Visit www.nrdc.org/paper for a full product list and to send a message to paper giant Kimberly-Clark, maker of Scott, Cottonelle, Kleenex, and Viva, telling the company to stop destroying boreal bird habitat. Three things you can do to help save our forests and birds: 1. Buy paper products with recycled content - especially post-consumer fibers. Look for products that have a high recycled content, including high post-consumer content. Post-consumer fibers are recovered from paper that was previously used by consumers and would otherwise have been dumped into a landfill or an incinerator. 2. Buy paper products made with clean, safe processes. Paper products are bleached to make them whiter and brighter, but chlorine used in many bleaching processes contributes to the formation of harmful chemicals that wind up in our air and water and are highly toxic to people and fish. Look for products labeled totally chlorine-free (TCF) or processed chlorine-free (PCF). In some cases, elemental chlorine-free (ECF) may be acceptable. 3. Tell tissue manufacturers to stop using virgin wood for throwaway products. If a brand you buy doesn't have any recycled content, contact the manufacturer. Tell the company to use more recycled fibers, to avoid sourcing from ecologically valuable forests such as those in the Cumberland Plateau and Canadian Boreal, and to ensure any virgin fibers used are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Saving forests also helps reduced global warming pollution. Here is a list of products that meet NRDC's environmental criteria: Facial tissue: Fluff Out, Hankies, Marcal, Seventh Generation Toilet paper: 365 (Whole Foods), Ambiance, April Soft, Best Value, Earth First, Fiesta, Marcal, Pert, Planet, Seventh Generation Paper towels: 365 (Whole Foods), Atlantic, Best Value, Earth First, Fiesta, Marcal, Pert, Planet, Seventh Generation Paper napkins: 365 (Whole Foods), Bella, Earth First, Marcal, Seventh Generation Products to avoid: Bounty, Charmin, Cottonelle, Kleenex, Puffs, Scott, Viva Reprinted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC does not endorse any products. Follow-up - Products available locally include the following: Seventh Generation:  D&W (Parkview & Oakland), Hardings (W. Main & Drake), Natural Health Food Center, People's Food Coop, Sawall Health Foods Green Forest (Planet):  Hardings (D Avenue, Richland; S. Westnedge; W. Main & Drake) Not all products are available at all locations. This is not an all-inclusive list but only a sampling.   CATS INDOORS: GOOD FOR BIRDS, GOOD FOR CATS  ASK invites you to join us in our effort to keep both cats and wild birds safe. Over the next few months, we'll be distributing brochures to area pet stores, veterinarians, and shelters that encourage people to keep their cats indoors. We could use your help! We'll have "Cats Indoors!" brochures available at our meetings for you to pick up and take to your vet or pet store. Scientists estimate that free-roaming cats kill hundreds of millions of birds and other small animals each year. These cats are also susceptible to injury, disease, parasites, or becoming lost, stolen, or poisoned. Cats that are kept indoors pose no threat to wildlife and face less risk of injury and disease. The American Bird Conservancy began the "Cats Indoors!" campaign in 1997 to educate cat owners and the general public. A wealth of information is available on their website, www.abcbirds.org/cats/. There you can learn how to slowly adapt your older cat to an indoor lifestyle, how to leash-train your cat, or get detailed information on the effect of outdoor cats on small animals. Please consider helping us in this campaign to keep birds and cats safe and healthy.   WHY ARE BANNED CHEMICALS STILL POLLUTING THE GREAT LAKES? By Mel Visser  That's what I wondered as I stood at the top of a Porcupine Mountain ski slope in the winter of 1995. How can there still be life-destroying quantities of PCBs, chlordane, toxaphene, and DDT in all that water? I was about to retire from 20 years of making chemicals followed by 16 years of corporate environmental respon-sibilities and could not get that haunting question out of my mind.   Through post-retirement volunteer efforts with Michigan's Great Lakes Protection Fund and EPA Chicago, I learned that since banning, the concentration of PCBs in Lake Superior had halved, but wildlife still had trouble reproducing. Lake Superior PCB con-centration remained constant, while Lake Michigan, after rapidly losing more than three-quarters of its PCBs, was only slowly decreasing.   With zero input, the PCB concentration in Lake Superior should continue to decrease. There had to be another source. The EPA suspected "Toxic Air Emissions," but subsequent elimination of millions of tons of emissions had no effect on the Great Lakes.  In 1984, Inuit women from the Canadian Arctic were found to have eight times more PCB in their milk than women from the Canadian Great Lakes area. Why? Could the source of this contamination be related to the Great Lakes? I had to find out.  From two trips to the Canadian High Arctic and the assimilation of international research, I found scientists concluding that PCBs and the North American-banned pesticides (persistent organic pollutants or POPs) such as toxaphene, DDT, chlordane, and Lindane were still used in tens of thousands of ton-per-year quantities in the developing world. They transported through the air to the Arctic in quantities that made the blubber of the narwhal and beluga whales so toxic it would be classified as hazardous waste.   Ongoing global POPs uses keep the Northern Hemisphere wrapped in a mantle of contaminated air. Every breath we take contains hundreds of millions of molecules of PCBs that were spilled from industries and pesticides poured onto fields thousands of miles away. This toxic mantle contaminates all the waters it touches. The Great Lakes are a part of this hemispheric ecosystem and are controlled by it. The only way to clean up the Great Lakes is to clean the air. The only way to clean the air is to remove inputs to the air ... globally.  The EPA's current agenda of spending billions to remove sediments to improve water quality will be a wasted effort. Thinking globally and acting locally does not work for PCBs and the banned POP pesticides.  I probably bring you new thoughts that are difficult to digest. I'm trained in the behavior of chemicals, and it took me years to figure this out, but once realizing that POPs take to the air and travel 24/7/365, all global data on environmental concentrations come together. It's really quite simple. We used POPs and contaminated from here to the Arctic and wherever they were measured. We banned them, but others grew their uses. The Northern Hemisphere remains contaminated.  My story has been published by the MSU Press as Cold, Clear and Deadly: Unraveling a Toxic Legacy, a readable 180 pages of this chemical mystery. Or to see more description, make comments, or ask questions, visit my blog at www.coldclearanddeadly.com   MICHIGAN'S KIRTLAND'S WARBLER POPULATION CONTINUES TO GROW According to the Department of Natural Resources, annual survey information indicates the population of the endangered Kirtland's Warbler continues to increase. 1,697 singing males were observed during 2007, up from 1,478 males in 2006. This represents the largest number of singing males recorded since monitoring began in 1951. The 2007 survey was a joint effort by the DNR, US Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Michigan Department of Military Affairs, and citizen volunteers. The Kirtland's Warbler survey is conducted each year over a 10-day period during the first two weeks of June when the birds are establishing their nesting territories. Warblers are detected by listening for their songs, which can be heard at distances up to 1/4mile, providing an excellent way to detect the birds with minimum disturbance. Only the males sing, so estimates of breeding population size are obtained by doubling the number of singing males recorded, based on the assumption that each male has a mate in its territory. This year, singing males (numbers in parentheses) were found in 12 LP counties: Alcona (175), Clare (147), Crawford (290), Grand Traverse (1), Iosco (238), Kalkaska (4), Montmorency (14), Ogemaw (529), Oscoda (198), Otsego (43), Presque Isle (6), and Roscommon (20).  32 singing males were found in five UPcounties:  Baraga (1), Chippewa (8), Delta (7), Marquette (8), and Schoolcraft (8). In the UP, females were observed with the males, indicating nesting activity.  Ten additional singing males were observed outside Michigan in Wisconsin (8) and Ontario (2).  Of particular importance this year was the discovery of three Kirtland's Warbler nests in Wisconsin, which represented the first documented breeding of Kirtland's Warblers outside Michigan in many decades. Although they have begun to expand into new areas, the core of the Kirtland's Warbler population remains dependent on northern Michigan's jack pine barrens ecosystem for nesting habitat. The warblers nest on the ground in stands of jack pine between four and 20 years old. Historically, these stands of young jack pine were created by natural wildfires that frequently swept through northern Michigan. Modern fire suppression programs altered this natural process, reducing Kirtland's Warbler habitat. The result was that the population of Kirtlands Warblers declined to the point that they were listed as endangered. To mimic the effects of wildfire, the forests are managed through a combination of clearcutting, burning, seeding, and replanting to promote warbler habitat. Approximately 3,000 acres of jack pine trees are planted or seeded annually on state and federal lands, primarily to provide habitat for Kirtland's Warblers. "New habitats are continually developed to replace those that become too old for Kirtland's Warbler nesting," said DNR Endangered Species Coordinator Todd Hogrefe. "Through continuing management, we expect there to be sufficient habitat to support the warbler population through the foreseeable future."   COFFEE BUYING GUIDE By Russ Schipper This information is from Tom Dietsch. Tom was one of the graduate students whose research in Central American coffee plantations was supported by ASK several years ago. He is still very much involved in the shade coffee issue. I saw him recently and he explained that the issue of good organic shade-grown coffee is still very relevant but admittedly complicated. The following guidelines that he has drawn up may help you when you are deciding which is the right shade-grown coffee to buy. I strongly encourage you to be careful in your choice of "shade-grown" coffee. The imposters will be helping themselves with, I believe, little interest in what organic shade-grown coffee can do for birds and people. By imposters I am referring to the coffee that has no or very soft criteria. It is complicated, but if you want the best, look only for the logos on Tom's lists. COFFEE BUYING GUIDE o If possible, buy triple certified coffee. o Buy certified coffee o Avoid mislabeled coffees. o Support cause-related coffees but encourage them to be certified. o Ask questions! o Find a good (certified) coffee you like, but experiment with different roasts and coffees from different countries. o Look for similar efforts in other products, like tea and chocolate. : COFFEE LINKS Shade-grown Coffee o Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center:  http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/MigratoryBirds/Coffee/ o Seattle Audubon:  www.shadecoffee.org Fair-trade Coffee o www.fairtrade.net o www.transfairusa.org o www.oxfamamerica.org/whatwedo/campaigns/coffee o www.globalexchange.org Cause-related Coffee o www.coffeekids.org   Prepared by:  Tom Dietsch, UCLA Center for Tropical Research (and formerly of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center)